I am not well travelled, but even with my limitations it was not hard to dig into my pictures and find one of a recent (rainy!) visit to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, one of the most visited tourist sites in the world.
And yesterday France, to its horror, saw a great fire that reduced the great building to what appears little more than a stone shell. The French President prioritised a site meeting and vowed that it shall be rebuilt. At first hearing this appears an unlikely ambition for the ultra-secular French Republic - but an icon is an icon. Hundreds of millions of Euros are already promised for its restoration.
'The World weeps', reads one newspaper headline, thereby conveniently forgetting hundreds of millions of people in the Muslim and the Eastern world who either don't know or certainly don't care that Notre Dame exists. It is a little hard to imagine the refugee camps along the Turkish border feeling that this morning they have lost something important.
What a contrast there is, this Easter Week, between the way we regard a Christian cultural icon and the way we regard the One that Christianity is all about.
Not for him a nation hanging a tearful head in mourning;
Not for him a National Leader making pledges of restoration;
Not for him a world weeping or a tweet from Rome's Imperial Palace.
Not for him (despite the written appellation the King of the Jews) a declaration that we have all lost a part of us.
A mocking crowd;
A Governor who has washed his hands;
A world that didn't notice;
A man abandoned, betrayed, denied even by his friends - not a part of us, said Peter.
May the flames of the icon, inflame our love for the Saviour to whom, at its best, the icon seeks to point.
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